WARNING:
Technically, we only know 3 things for sure about Tali.
Died in a Hamas suicide bombing
"She was 16 and the best of us"
had compassion
And maybe what she looked like when she was 4 or 5 years old.
I've taken it upon myself to fill in the gaps. The Tali I have characterized may turn out to be quite different than many people have pictured her. Sure she has compassion, but was she oblivious? Delicate? Innocent? Hardly. She was a teenager, after all.
Quite clearly, I never finished high school. I'm pretty sure Ziva did before she joined the IDF and Ari had enough credits to get his diploma a year early. Ari was extremely intelligent, but all Ziva ever really needed were her street smarts.
I skipped school a lot, not of my own accord either. I always had something to do for Mossad, and my teachers could not argue when my excuse notes came from the government that funded it.
I was constantly called to the office to receive phone calls during class. It was usually my father or his secretary informing me that he would be traveling to a top secret location immediately and was unsure of when he would return. I appreciated the thought, but I really should have been in class, I always had a lot to catch up on. I would sigh and say that I would be okay then slouch off to class, avoiding the lady at the desk's curious gaze. Sometimes it was Ari calling to tell me that he was picking me up, in fact, he was right outside.
High school life was pretty much non-existent for me. I would study when I could in the wee hours of the morning and go in at least once a week so I could take all my tests and quizzes.
I did alright in school, I had a B average. If my occupation had not been premeditated, I think I wanted to open a tea shop. I could sell my cookies and pies and serve my jasmine tea and lime hangover remedy to people stumbling into work. Maybe I could have even run a safe house in the basement for the wayward officers and agents, whose situations I could sympathize with. I think I would have liked that.
In my final year I would wake up from a Sunday night binge to find that I had blacked out all through Monday. In Paris, things had been different. I worked hard in school, and we only drank on the weekends and holidays. Over the last summer I had gotten into a bad habit with the rest of my (much older) friends. I had so many more problems than school. Needless to say there were hospital visits involved. And even more obvious- I was not a normal teenager.
I sat with my old middle school friends and tried to relate to their entire lives and conversations that seemed alien to me at best. I felt like an intruder listening to them talk about sports and boys and classes. I would quickly fall behind in their long, detailed and complicated stories usually filled with gossip about people I had never met. I was never bothered to tune back in and pay attention.